While I appreciate a film attempting to
address hot button topics, this needs to be done in a way that is intelligent
and thoughtful. It is not merely enough to make a movie about a transgender
teenager as she navigates the tough road to becoming transsexual. Some might
argue that any film with this topic is a step in the right direction, because
at least these characters are being depicted onscreen, but the film also has to
be good in order for people to see it. If nobody sees the film, it doesn’t much
help the conversation, and I definitely would not recommend 3 Generations to anyone, in or out of
the LGTBQ community. This is a poorly made film full of contrivances and
unsympathetic characters, badly written and lazily directed. Worst of all, the
transgender character is not even the main focus of the narrative, despite
being at the center of it.

Chapter
& Verse suffers from a familiar narrative, which leads audiences down
expected paths to an inevitable conclusion. The predictability of the story
could easily have rendered the film irrelevant, but it somehow remains compelling
thanks to a screenplay co-written by star and director, which feels poetic
without being overworked. It has the raw honesty and realism that Barry Jenkins
was praised for last year and the social realism that Spike Lee built his
career upon, even if missing the distinct directorial style that each of these
directors put in their films.

Actor-turned-director Vincent Pérez was
already facing an uphill battle when he decided to make a film based on Hans
Fallada’s novel about a middle-aged Berlin
couple quietly resisting against the brutality of the Nazi regime. As
intriguing as the concept sounds, the form of resistance taken was as
unexciting as possible. There are no battles against the violence, speeches
about the terror, or collaboration with enemies fighting the Nazis directly.
Instead, the film centers on a silent resistance against Nazi propaganda, which
means the primary action involves our protagonist writing postcards.

Ever since James Cameron successfully mixed a
fictional love story in with true-life tragedy in Titanic, there have been countless other failed attempts to do the
same. Peal Harbor copied the formula almost
exactly, even including an unnecessary love triangle to take over the
narrative. You might think that filmmakers would realize that this is a
misstep, and almost seems to trivialize the real-life events, but Bitter Harvest compounds these mistakes
by placing them in a film about one of the largest genocides in history. Rather
than focusing on the massive scale of the real-world atrocities,
director/co-writer George Mendeluk mistakenly spends a majority of the film
narrowing the scope to the fictional experiences of a single couple.

Though restrained in its scenes of large
emotional outbursts and rousing speeches, A
United Kingdom faces the unfortunate problem of being released the same
year of another subtle interracial romance based on true events. Loving was so expertly made without the
need of melodrama or sentimentality that even sparsely used in A United Kingdom, these moments ring a
bit contrived. Along with teary speeches and somewhat contrived feel-good
moments, there is also a redundancy in Guy Hibbert’s screenplay and a
surprising blandness in Amma Asante’s visual style, so that the one-note themes
of A United Kingdom begin to wear
thin, regardless of how convincing the chemistry is between the leads.

Although inspired by real-life tragic events, Operation Mekong works better as a
mindless action film than it does as a respectful tribute to the lives lost.
Even when the movie does give reverence to the Chinese characters engaged in
the operation, it feels more like nationalist propaganda than a realistic
depiction of actual people who gave their lives for justice. Director Dante Lam
has had trouble with the spectacle of his films conflicting with the message in
the past, and though this is not the problem with Operation Mekong, survivors of the victims may wish it were. On the
other hand, those who merely want a few hours of intense procedural action will
likely be pleased with the non-stop spectacle.